We’ve been having a few days in Ireland and doing a bit of touring. We crossed the Shannon River from Kerry to Clare on the ferry from Tarbert . On the Clare side is a ruined jetty that’s been colonised by cormorants . They sit quietly and wait for the right opportunity to dive for prey . Not easy to draw,like most birds I’ve drawn they don’t keep still, so I have to capture a quick impression.
Husb and I started travelling late last night,all the way to the West Coast of Ireland,via ferry and lots of hard driving. We’re in a tiny village near the Shannon river and this scruffy little feral cat has persuaded my relatives to feed him. He’s unapproachable but content to hang out in the garden in this unseasonably warm weather.
He hasn’t been neutered and he’s obviously been in lots of fights and has a deformed ear. So my family call him van Gogh. Or Scabby Cat. He stayed still just long enough to do a bit of a scribble on my tablet using the Magic Marker app.
I had the Tablet to hand this morning while Husb was doing his exercises so I did a quick scribble. It’s a real challenge to draw someone who’s moving fast,you have to concentrate on the general outline and main features,there’s no time to get any details down. It becomes a bit of a mass of scribbles but that’s keeping true to the process.
I’ve been working with an international collaborative group of artist/printmakers to develop a portrfolio of full-colour monotypes for the Rocky Mountain Printmaking Symposium Biennale in Utah, USA next month. It’s been a good experience to work with such talented artists from Swansea Printmaking Workshop and I’m really excited that these prints are going across the world. There are also USA artists making work for this portfolio, which is being organised by Wingtip Press in Boise, Idaho. If you want to know more about the monotype technique we’ve been using, click here.
Finished the third day of drawing in public at the Creative Bubble shop. It was stimulating to have the space to work on a very large piece with other artists close by. I’m developing some large-scale drawings, overlaying different types of drawing media. This is brown wrapping paper underneath with tracing parchment on top. The bottom layer is drawn with compressed charcoal and chalk but I switched to oilbars and Indian ink, applied with a large reed pen, on the translucent tracing parchment. The building in the background is the old Palace Theatre in Swansea, currently the focus of a campaign to save it from falling to bits.
We’ve finished the event now, although we’re hoping to do this monthly, but we’ve left the work on site, putting a pop-up exhibition in the shop windows for the rest of the weekend. I’d like to do this in all the empty shop windows in the city centre.
I’m working with artgroup 15 Hundred Lives, at the Creative Bubble Shop in Swansea for 3 days. We’re doing our second ‘What Do Artists Do All Day‘ event. I’m doing another big drawing installation. The aim of these events is for the public to be able to see how artists work; how we create an artwork from the start. Most people only ever see a work of art in a gallery or hanging on someone’s wall, all completed and framed. Often they’ll have no idea how it’s made, so we’re working in the shop / gallery for three days so people can come in and see how it’s done.
At this stage I’m drawing onto brown wrapping paper; several sheets stuck together with paper gumstrip and stapled to the wall. I’m using compressed charcoal and chalk. The image is an interpretation of a local landmark, The Palace Theatre. It’s really tiring because I’m on my feet all day. My Nana used to say ‘Ooh! My dogs are barking!’ when her feet were tired and aching. I don’t know why. More to come tomorrow.
I’m keeping on practicing with the digital drawing and took the tablet to life drawing this evening. I’m not sure I like this drawing but doing it has given me a good idea of what the app is capable of. I like the scribbliness of it but the colour palette isn’t good enough. But I’ll persevere with this for the time being, mainly because I just can’t be bothered to start with a new app.
Drawn with the Magic Marker app on a Samsung Galaxy 8 tablet.
It’s been a long day, ending with a talk at Swansea Print Workshop this evening. I took my sketchbook to do some scribbles for my blog but I was really tired and my sketches are pretty scrappy. But there you go; sometimes it’s like that. You can’t always get what you want.
I did this sketch when Husb and I visited Stonehenge recently. It’s a large single stone some distance outside the main stone circle. It’s called the Heelstone and I was struck by it’s anthropomorphic features – it looked like a strange face from several angles. I wondered if it had been deliberate, whether the original stonemasons had carved these features, but then I found out that farmers in the not-so-distant past used to hire out hammers to tourists to chip off bits of the stones as souvenirs! So it’s probably due to vandalism.
In the background is the A 344, which is only a few yards from the stone and cuts across the ancient processional Avenue. The road’s being removed and the site restored after a government committment to UNESCO in 1986. About time too. Once it’s gone, people will be able to approach the monument as they would have when it was first built.
This is drawn into my A5 clothbound sketchbook, using Faber Castell Pitt drawing pens and Winsor & Newton watercolours.
scribblah 